Green goners: Republicans leaving voters green at the gills, red in the face

Chris Horner

Christopher C. Horner serves as a Senior Fellow at CEI. As an attorney in Washington, DC Horner has represented CEI as well as scientists and Members of the U.S. House and Senate on matters of environmental policy in the federal courts including the Supreme Court. He has written on numerous topics in publications ranging from law reviews to legal and industrial trade journals to print and online opinion pages, and is the author of two best-selling books: Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud and Deception to Keep You Misinformed (Regnery, 2008) and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism (Regnery, 2007), which spent half of 2007 on the New York Times bestseller list.

On Sunday, The Washington Post ran a long article noting (gloating?) that in 2010, “Construction did not begin on a single new coal-fired power plant in the United States for the second straight year,” with plans for 38 new plants dropped and even more older plants scheduled for retirement. Apparently we’re leaving that to our supposed “green” model, China, even though we have enough coal to last for centuries. This is reckless, the result of policies, threats and uncertainty out of Washington all tied to “global warming.”

With this hot off the press, incoming House Energy and Commerce Committee chairman Fred Upton took to the airwaves to ever so slightly tweak the tough talk he used to win the gavel. Now the new Republican majority wants to regulate carbon dioxide, but — wait for it — in a reasonable way.

Asked whether he believes greenhouse gases are a problem in need of addressing at all, Upton replied, “we want to do this in a reasonable way,” and cited the need to boost development of energy sources like low-emissions coal, nuclear power and natural gas to meet growing demand.

“I don’t think that we have to regulate carbon to the degree that we have a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system,” Upton said, adding that “this regulation process is not the way to proceed” either.

But, since Kyoto wouldn’t detectably impact the temperature even if we accept all moonbat assumptions arguendo, maybe there is not a “reasonable way” for the U.S. Congress to ration energy sources in the name of changing the temperature? Aren’t futile gestures, at times like this, facially unreasonable? Anyway, we’ve got our first entrant in the Post‘s “Strange New Respect” sweepstakes.

This comes on top of something similar sticking to the heels of most Republican presidential aspirants, helpfully raised by Politico, whose story begins:

Green skeletons lurk in GOP closets

It may be heresy to conservatives, but a trip down memory lane shows nearly all of the top-tier Republican presidential contenders want to save the planet from global warming.

On the campaign stump, in books, speeches and nationally-televised commercials, aspiring GOP White House candidates such as Tim Pawlenty, Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney have warned in recent years about the threats from climate change and pledged to limit greenhouse gases. Some have even committed the ultimate sin, endorsing the controversial cap-and-trade concept that was eventually branded “cap and tax.”

Now, as they prepare for a wide-open primary season, many of the Republicans are searching for ways to explain themselves to a conservative voting base full of hungry tea party activists and climate skeptics who don’t take kindly to environmental issues so closely linked with Al Gore.

“They’re in an odd place,” Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, told POLITICO. “They better have an explanation, an excuse or a mea culpa for why this won’t happen again.”

Pawlenty had threatened to create a real problem when he telegraphed his intention to refine his global warming position, which includes a history of outright activism: no regrets, no abandon-and-explain, but double down on his climate change position. Before flaming out, he would do real damage.

Yet, with some comments he has made in 2010 and now this Politico piece, Pawlenty is actually one of the more advanced candidates in distancing himself from past missteps. He deserves help on that.

He was governor of Minnesota – land of 10,000 mass-transit-pushing organizations, the only state that went for Mondale, the state that gave us Wellstone and Humphrey, the state currently looking to get high-speed internet up to all of the residents and beavers and moose north of the Boundary Waters (for fairness, you know, ‘cuz those cityboyz can do that facebook thing), the high-tax public-rest-area-in-every-pot state that keeps fighting for the most anti-business slogans every year.

And he got quite a bit done in Minnesota, in spite of the dems who controlled both chambers of the legislature and pretty much every public office, the entire media set but for one small talk station, a very strong teachers’ union, and a goofy, slightly addled affluent ex-hippie population in the metro areas.

So, if he had to do silly things like hum Bob Dylan songs every once in a while, or pay lip service to the hot air . . . er . . . the wind industry and the ethanol industry . . . if he had to pretend he likes trains . . . well, cut him some slack. He consistently took risks and kept tax increases at bay.

Sorry brothers and sisters but I’m passing on the CO2 because I can’t keep scaring my kids. I love them too much. Can we admit the CO2 mistake and move on? I feel like I’M the neocon now for this false war and fear mongering. We gotta change.
What the editors won’t tell you:
The IPCC scientists agree that:

1-humans have an effect.

2-the degree of the effects are projected to be:

A: negligible to nothing to little if any.

B: runaway unstoppable warming.

I did the math. 24 years, no effects. OOPs! I forgot, Humans make all bad weather now (extreme) and some day if we tax the air live sustainable (poverty and or going back in time), we can make our poor little 5 billion year old helpless planet be like it should be, like it used to be. Like the inside of an indoor shopping mall. Safe. Predictable and CONTROLLED.